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'LHA cap' will apply to existing supported housing tenants
A new housing benefit cap will apply to existing as well as future supported housing tenants, a senior Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) official has said.
The confirmation that the ‘Local Housing Allowance (LHA) cap’ will apply to existing tenants came as a surprise to housing figures, as previous proposals as outlined would only apply to future tenants.
Darrell Smith, housing policy manager the DWP, told an audience at the National Housing Federation’s annual conference in Birmingham today: “For all supported housing residents from April 2019, [the cap] will apply to everybody…
“That’s not what the chancellor announced in the Autumn Statement, that was around tenancy start dates. But the plan for supported housing is that it applies to everybody in there and the reasoning around that is that it would be too complicated to run two systems at the same time.”
Last Thursday, the government announced that housing benefit in supported housing would be limited to LHA rates, with additional ringfenced cash distributed to councils.
In the Autumn Statement last year, the government announced that from 2018, LHA rates would be applied to housing benefit and Universal Credit for all social rented tenancies that began from April 2016.
Supported housing tenants were given an exemption until April 2017.
However, the latest proposals outlined today would mean that all supported housing tenants will be affected, whether they are an existing or future tenant. The move therefore extends the scope of the cap, and could have wide ramifications for the viability of existing supported housing schemes.
The cap for general needs tenants would still only affect new tenants from 2016, according to current proposals.
The DWP took this decision because of the difficulties of setting aside a ‘local pot’ if the cap was only applied to future housing tenants
